Youth is about a group of people on holiday-though it feels more like an Elysian Fields/purgatory-at an exclusive Swiss mountainside resort who are at different turning points in their lives. Michael Caine plays a retired classical music composer. Harvey Keitel plays his best friend, a filmmaker, who is also working on his next movie surrounded by younger screenwriters. Rachel Weisz plays Caine’s daughter. Paul Dano plays an actor frustrated by the tension between fame and artistic success.
Youth is a mixture of fiction and fact with occasional realistic surreal sequences to depict the psychological state of the characters. I found it simultaneously beautiful, enjoyable, pretentious, repulsive and arrogant. I fell asleep after the first twenty minutes. The characters struggle with past success, mourn the end of any future success and what was lost, but ultimately pave a way out of purgatory and into future success and happiness.
On one hand, these are universal, poignant struggles that all human beings face. On the other hand, I found it hard to feel bad for a bunch of people at a beautiful spa resort being admired and catered to as they feel sorry for themselves. Youth suffers a bit too much from Ridley Scott’s outrage that *gasp* he is human and not a god with an infinite life span in exchange for gracing the world with his artistic brilliance. Eye roll. The scene where Caine pretends to conduct nature is supposed to be beautiful, but to me, it screamed of the arrogance of man’s imagined place in nature.
There was one repugnant Hitler scene where a character dresses as Hitler to prepare for a role. Everyone stops eating as he is fed soup. Maybe this is deeper commentary on Switzerland’s role in WWII or even the wealthy characters’ ignorance of the upheaval that unwittingly surrounds them until they are confronted by it, and then they still fail to act, but just stay unmoved (literally) in their comfort. If that is the case, bravo, but I think that interpretation is generous. Instead it felt like a scene that was aiming more for shock value than character development.
I have a rule: every movie has one scene that reveals what the filmmaker really thought of the movie that the viewer is watching. That scene occurs in Youth when Jane Fonda calls out Keitel for his “cinematic BS.” Honestly Jane Fonda gives Youth a much needed swift kick to the derriere and brought more life to the movie than any of the younger plays.
Youth is a beautiful film despite its many flaws, but I don’t think that it is an enjoyable one. I would love it if the filmmaker admitted that Youth has more in common with Grown Ups than most people believe. A bunch of actors and filmmakers wanted to stay in the resort and made the movie as an excuse. Also did the Queen of England give special permission to use her in the narrative?